What can you do with SURFconext?

SURFconext offers 'Single Sign On'-access to a large and increasing number of online services. About 200 Dutch organizations in the area of secondary vocational-, higher education and research are using SURFconext for this. Among the most used services are Brightspace, SURFspot, Blackboard, Google Apps for Education and several library services.

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Identity Providers

An Identity Provider is an organization which provides information about the identity of a user that makes authentication of a user possible. Examples of Identity Providers are Universities and research institutions. These organizations deliver the identities for their students and employees.

A Service Provider (SP) is an organization which delivers content and services that are available via the internet. For example: Web shops, video services and publishers but also educational institutions which offer online courses for students from other institutions. Examples are SURFspot, Google Apps for Education, Edugroepen, Blackboard, etc.

What advantages does SURFconext offer for my organization?

The group of organizations (connected IdP's) in The Netherlands who use SURFconext, consist of universities, university hospitals and tertiary medical teaching hospitals, universities of applied sciences, research institutions and senior secondary vocational education institutions. Together they represent a group of about 1.5 million users. These users generate millions of logins per month and use over a thousand different cloud services.

SURFconext allows users to have access to services offered by multiple Service Providers using only 1 account. Besides this, SURFconext facilitates online collaboration in the cloud. This can be done between users of the same organization as well as users between different organizations.

For IdP's

If you connect your organization to SURFconext, you will enjoy the following advantages:

By connecting to SURFconext only once, you can easily provide users access to any of the connected services.

You don't have to implement and maintain a custom made connection to each service or Service Provider separately.

Why should I connect to SURFconext?

See the above mentioned advantages. The number of available cloud services is growing quickly. Most organizations consider to use these services combined with internally hosted services. Besides this, organizations want to offer a secure environment where both internal and external services can be used side by side. Important elements for this are Single Sign-On, trusted identity and collaboration in groups and teams. Organizations are looking for possibilities to integrate these different kinds of applications. SURFconext offers starting points to realize this.